David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“You know which one it is,” he said, letting them fall. “Just use the other to come in by the poolside.”

I unlocked the gate, rested my bike against the wall of the courtyard, and went round along the edge of the pool. It was clean now but heavy with shadows. I turned the key in the glass door, found my way (though this part of the house was new to me) to the stairs, and climbed to where another door opened straight on to the roof.

“Ah,” he said, smiling. “So at last! You are here.”

The roof was unwalled but set so deep among trees that it was as if I had stepped out of the city altogether into some earlier, more darkly wooded era. Only lighted windows, hanging detached in the dark, showed where houses, where neighbours were.

He fixed the telescope for me and I moved into position. “There,” he “what you can see now is Jupiter with its four moons — you see? — all in line, and with the bands across its face.”

I saw. Later it was Saturn with its rings and the lower of the two pointers to the cross, Alpha Centauri, which was not one star but two. It was miraculous. From that moment below when I had looked up at a cascade of light that was still ages off, I might have been catapulted twenty thousand years into the nearer past, or into my own future. Solid spheres hovered above me, tiny balls of matter moving in concert like the atoms we drew in chemistry, held together by invisible lines of force; and I thought oddly that if I were to lower the telescope now to where I had been standing at the entrance to the drive I would see my own puzzled, upturned face, but as a self I had already outgrown and abandoned, not minutes but aeons back. He shifted the telescope and I caught my breath. One after another, constellations I had known since childhood as points of light to be joined up in the mind (like those picture-puzzles children make, pencilling in the scattered dots till Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs appear, or an old jalopy), came together now, not as an imaginary panhandle or bull's head or belt and sword, but at some depth of vision I hadn't known I possessed, as blossoming abstractions, equations luminously exploding out of their own depths, brilliantly solving themselves and playing the results in my head as a real and visible music. I felt a power in myself that might actually burst out at my ears, and at the same time saw myself, from out there, as just a figure with his eye to a lens. I had a clear sense of being one more hard little point in the immensity — but part of it, a source of light like all those others — and was aware for the first time of the grainy reality of my own life, and then, a fact of no large significance, of the certainty of my death; but in some dimension where those terms were too vague to be relevant. It was at the point where my self ended and the rest of it began that Time, or Space, showed its richness to me. I was overwhelmed.

Slowly, from so far out, I drew back, re-entered the present and was aware again of the close suburban dark — of its moving now in the shape of a hand. I must have known all along that it was there, working from the small of my back to my belly, up the inside of my thigh, but it was of no importance, I was too far off. Too many larger events were unfolding for me to break away and ask, as I might have, "What are you doing?”

I must have come immediately. But when the stars blurred in my eyes it was with tears, and it was the welling of this deeper salt, filling my eyes and rolling down my cheeks, that was the real overflow of the occasion. I raised my hand to brush them away and it was only then that I was aware, once again, of the Professor. I looked at him as from a distance. He was getting to his feet, and his babble of concern, alarm, self-pity, sentimental recrimination, was incomprehensible to me. I couldn't see what he meant.

“No, no, it's nothing,” I assured him, turning aside to button my shorts. “It was nothing. Honestly.” I was unwilling to say more in case he misunderstood what I did not understand myself.

We stood on opposite sides of the occasion. Nothing of what he had done could make the slightest difference to me, I was untouched: youth is too physical to accord very much to that side of things. But what I had seen— what he had led me to see — my bursting into the life of things — I would look back on that as the real beginning of my existence, as the entry into a vocation, and nothing could diminish the gratitude I felt for it. I wanted, in the immense seriousness and humility of this moment, to tell him so, but I lacked the words, and silence was fraught with all the wrong ones.

“I have to go now,” was what I said.

“Very well. Of course.”

He looked hopeless. He might have been waiting for me to strike him a blow — not a physical one. He stood quietly at the gateway while I wheeled out the bike.

I turned then and faced him, and without speaking, offered him, very formally, my hand. He took it and we shook — as if, in the magnanimity of my youth, I had agreed to overlook his misdemeanour or forgive him. That misapprehension too was a weight I would have to bear.

Carrying it with me, a heavy counterpoise to the extraordinary lightness that was my whole life, I bounced unsteadily over the dark tufts of the driveway and out onto the road.

They were an ill-assorted party. Gordon and Cassie, who had known one another almost since childhood, were still just friends, as they had been for so long now that Cassie despaired of their ever getting further. She had spent four years being in love with Gordon and felt a fool, but was still under his spell. His various forms of selfishness, all so frank and boyishly certain of their appeal, still worked on her, and she knew that if he made the least offer of himself she would say yes and spend the rest of her life typing his articles, keeping up with his interests and defending him from detractors. That's how she was, and that's how Gordon was as well.

She had simply rushed down here, for example, the moment she thought he was involved, but by the time she arrived he had already lost interest in the girl who had turned up so frequently in his letters of the previous month, and Cassie, who had disliked Anick at sight, soon made a friend of her, seeing quite clearly that this spoiled and rather unworldly French girl would be no more successful with Gordon than she had been. She had even at last grown fond of her — they had something in common; though Anick was elegant, almost beautiful, and Cassie had never been either.

Anick made up the third in their party, and the fourth was a soft American youth of not much more than twenty who earlier in the week had fallen in love with Anick and had since been following her about like a whipped puppy. Anick tended to laugh at him, but when he cried, as he often did, she let him sit with his head in her lap while she stroked his floppy hair, but at the same time made faces; and afterwards made the same faces when she described the scene to Cassie in her limited and brutal English.

Michael, the American boy, was really Austrian — that is, his parents were, but he spoke worse German than the rest of them (they were all doing a summer course at Graz) and was foolishly impressed by everything foreign and picturesque: by the Alpine cabins they passed with their carved wooden overhangs, by votive crosses high up in the mist of passes, the leather shorts and dirndls of villagers, a little steepled church in a cleft among firs, and the pumpy band-music that was being played in one place in the light of a thunderous waterfall. Gordon and Cassie were Australians, but they had never been so wide-eyed and impressionable as Michael, to whom all this might, after all, have been as familiar as home.